Captured videos are blurred

[Mike00z]

Hi everyone!

I'm a complete newbie in the planetary imaging. This past Sunday tried to film Jupiter, Saturn and Mars, but all videos look blurred and lack contrast. 

https://youtu.be/Up4z0BMBSmE

https://youtu.be/oEpeYnQIWE8

https://youtu.be/nZX3iMFXPfk

However, in the eyepiece the picture is better and has more saturated colors than on the videos. I've tried to play around with gain, exposure and other settings of the webcam, but this gives very little to none effect.

Here's an example of one of the settings I used:

Frame Divisor=1
Resolution=640x480
FPS=10,00
Colour Space=YUY2
Exposure=15,6ms
Brightness=83
Contrast=30
Saturation=100
Gamma=0
Colour Enable=255
Backlight Compensation=0
Gain=23

My setup:

I use Philips SPC 900NC PC Camera with SkyWatcher 1200mm telescope and Barlow 2x lens. For recording videos I use SharpCap. The video was filmed from Kharkiv, Ukraine.

I'm probably doing something wrong because I've seen similar setup producing great results.

Does it make sense to process these videos in programs like Registax to get a good picture?

Just looking for any generic tips, or settings that have worked for you guys.

Thanks!

 

[Davey-T]

Hi Mike and welcome to SGL.

Links aren't working but planetary videos are by nature very blurry and this gets sorted in processing.

Dave

[Marky1973]

They do look quite blurred, but I am no expert so not sure if they are really any good. But, as Dave said, planetary videos are, by their very nature, blurry until processed.

Once you have the video though you do need to process with a variety of tools.

I usually use PIPP to process the video - it is a free tool that effectively sorts through the video and pulls out the individual frames as individual images. You can do all sorts of other things with it but you can discard anything under a certain quality.

Then I would go to AUTOSTAKKERT - another free program to stack the images I have pulled out of the video through PIPP

Finally, you can use REGISTAX (also free ? ) to finesse the image with "wavelets"

There is obviously a lot more to it than just that, but there are loads of tutorials out there and advice on this forum. It is three stages but, once you have the hang of them, they can be fairly quick. I won't go into the extra hassles of derotating images of Jupiter etc, that's for another day! (and I have never done it, so I'm not the best person to explain.

Try it out on your videos. You might not get anything, but you might be able to pull something out that shows you a little more detail and will help you see how the image can improve. The planets aren't favourable for us in the UK at the moment, so presuming it might be the same for you, so we are fighting low positions and atmospherics all the time. Try it again another night and it might be completely different.

Good luck!

[Mike00z]

Thanks for your advice, Mark. 

I'll definitely try to capture more videos later. Maybe there's nothing wrong with my setup and it's just the weather conditions. I'm just trying to get as good source material as possible so it'll be easier to process it. And since I've never done this before, I'm not sure what quality the video should be at this first capture step.

Meanwhile, can you point out where I can find good tutorials on topics that you've mentioned? I'm completely new to this, so there's a lot of learning to be done.

Really appreciate your help.

Mike

[Tomatobro]

They do not look too bad. I am constantly amazed how the processing software sorts out the video to produce half decent images.

[Marky1973]

Hi Mike

if you have access to YouTube then you should be able to search for any of those programmes and find tutorials, or search on this forum and you are bound to find something. I suspect there will be info on the websites where you can download them to. Have a play with them and don't be afraid to ask questions on here.

I struggle with planetary and find the conditions and quality change almost between images - probably why they call it "lucky imaging" - you just have to keep at it. Learn the techniques and processes and then maybe consider a new camera aimed at planetary work!

The main thing is not to give up!

 

?

Cheers

 

Mark